The Syntax of Prenominal and Postnominal Adjectives in Old English

The Syntax of Prenominal and Postnominal Adjectives in Old English

Author: Agnieszka Pysz

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13:

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This book is the first monograph which provides a comprehensive discussion of the syntactic behaviour of Old English (OE) adnominal adjectives. Drawing on the empirical data retrieved from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor, Warner, Pintzuk & Beths 2003), the author proposes an analysis of OE adjectives by means of a theoretical apparatus couched in the framework of Chomskyâ (TM)s generative grammar. The analysis incorporates the following properties of OE adjectives: â [ their inflectional patterning, i.e. whether adjectives take â oeweakâ and â oestrongâ inflectional endings â [ the so-called adjective stacking, i.e. whether adjectives can occur in uninterrupted strings â [ the surface placement with respect to their complements â [ the surface placement with respect to the nominal head The author observes that the differences between prenominal and postnominal adjectives go far beyond the superficial difference in their surface placement. She argues therefore that the two types of adjectives require two different theoretical treatments. The volume consists of five chapters. It is supplemented by four appendices and an extensive bibliography.


The Development of Old English

The Development of Old English

Author: Don Ringe

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-10-31

Total Pages: 629

ISBN-13: 0191019429

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This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change. The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.


The Development of Old English

The Development of Old English

Author: Donald A. Ringe

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 629

ISBN-13: 0199207844

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This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change. The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.


Adjectives as nouns, mainly as attested in [i]Boethius[/i] translations from Old to Modern English and in Modern German

Adjectives as nouns, mainly as attested in [i]Boethius[/i] translations from Old to Modern English and in Modern German

Author: Anne Aschenbrenner

Publisher: Herbert Utz Verlag

Published: 2014-07-23

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 3831643652

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Adjectives can be used as nouns in English as well as in German. In Modern German, however, they can assume a greater variety of forms than is possible in Modern English, partly as a result of the loss of inflectional endings in English; e.g. Modern German [i]gut – das Gut, das Gute, der Gute, die Gute, die Guten, die Güter[/i] (also [i]die Güte, die Gutheit)[/i] versus Modern English [i]good – the good, the goods[/i] (also [i]goodness).[/i] With regard to this phenomenon, two issues deserve attention: first of all, the historical development of adjectives as nouns in English and, secondly, their linguistic classification. The merit of this study is that it undertakes the first detailed analysis of this phenomenon with the aid of corpus material. The investigation leads to intriguing conclusions that combine several linguistic levels of description, and that break with traditional concepts of rigid word-classes in favor of a theory of degrees of »adjectiviness« and »nouniness«.


Creation and Use of Historical English Corpora in Spain

Creation and Use of Historical English Corpora in Spain

Author: Nila Vázquez

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-10-21

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1443870196

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Even before the Helsinki Corpus was published, Spain had a good amount of Historical English researchers, such as the group directed by Teresa Fanego in Santiago de Compostela. In the last couple of decades, the number of scholars working in the field of Historical Corpus Linguistics has increased, and, nowadays, there are some interesting projects in Spain that will result in the publication of valuable material for scholars throughout the world. The aim of this volume is twofold. On the on...


Noun phrases in early Germanic languages

Noun phrases in early Germanic languages

Author: Kristin Bech

Publisher: Language Science Press

Published: 2024-03-01

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 3961104670

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On the premise that syntactic variation is constrained by factors that may not always be immediately obvious, this volume explores various perspectives on the nominal syntax in the early Germanic languages and the syntactic diversity they display. The fact that these languages are relatively well attested and documented allows for individual cases studies as well as comparative studies. Due to their well-observable common ancestry at the time of their earliest attestations, they moreover permit close-up comparative investigations into closely related languages. Besides the purely empirical aspects, the volume also explores the methodological side of diagnosing, classifying and documenting the details of syntactic diversity. The volume starts with a description by Alexander Pfaff and Gerlof Bouma of the principles underlying the Noun Phrases in Early Germanic Languages (NPEGL) database, before Alexander Pfaff presents the Patternization method for measuring syntactic diversity. Kristin Bech, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, and George Walkden carry out a pilot study of noun phrase variation in Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. Kristin Bech then considers the development of Old English noun phrases with quantifiers meaning ‘many’. Alexandra Rehn’s study is concerned with the inflection of stacked adjectives in Old High German and Alemannic. Old High German is also the topic of Svetlana Petrova’s study, which looks at inflectional patterns of attributive adjectives. With Hannah Booth’s contribution we move to Old Icelandic and the use of the proprial article as a topic management device. Juliane Tiemann investigates adjective position in Old Norwegian. Alexander Pfaff and George Walkden then take a broader view of adjectival articles in early Germanic, before Alexander Pfaff rounds off the volume with a study of a peculiar class of adjectives, the so-called positional predicates, which occur across the early Germanic languages.


Grammar – Discourse – Context

Grammar – Discourse – Context

Author: Kristin Bech

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-12-20

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 3110682664

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This collected volume brings together a wide array of international linguists working on diachronic language change with a specific focus on the history of English, who work within usage-based frameworks and investigate processes of grammatical change in context. Although usage-based linguistics emphasizes the centrality of the discourse context for language usage and cognition, this insight has not been fully integrated into the investigation of processes of grammatical variation and change. The structuralist heritage as well as corpus linguistic methodologies have favoured de-contextualized analytical perspectives on contemporary and historical language data and on the mechanisms and processes guiding grammatical variation and change. From a range of different perspectives, the contributions to this volume take up the challenge of contextualization in the investigation of grammatical variation and change in different stages of English language history and discuss central theoretical notions such as gradable grammaticality, motivation in hypervariation, and hypercharacterization. The book will be relevant to students and linguists working in the field of diachronic and variational linguistics and English language history.


Generative Investigations

Generative Investigations

Author: Piotr Bański

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1527551334

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This volume is a collection of studies in generative (morpho)syntax and phonology, which grew out of the 6th Generative Phonology in Poland (GLiP) meeting that took place at the University of Warsaw in the spring of 2008. The sixteen papers, written by the leading scholars in linguistics as well as young researchers, give a representative flavour of investigations across (morpho)syntax and phonology from the current generative perspective. Drawing on recent advances in formal linguistics, the majority of studies in this volume test the applicability of available theoretical frameworks to selected bodies of data. Some papers discuss the adequacy of competing theoretical solutions in the light of new experimental results. The empirical data is drawn from a variety of languages including standard and dialectal Polish, Russian, Croatian, Czech, English, Frisian and Swahili. The purpose is not only to illustrate long-standing problems but also to highlight less known facts. The collection will thus be relevant to those concerned with theoretical accounts, experimental findings, Slavic and general linguistics.


Multiple Determiners and the Structure of DPs

Multiple Determiners and the Structure of DPs

Author: Artemis Alexiadou

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-02-19

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9027270694

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This book is a research monograph that investigates the crosslinguistic distribution of multiple determiners. In some languages, noun phrases permit or even seem to require a double or multiple realization of definite/indefinite markers in certain modification environments. The book develops tools that can be used to keep the different instantiations of the phenomenon apart and argues that a uniform account thereof is not desirable. On the basis of these tools, it advances the proposal that there are different types of multiple occurrences of determiners (and sub-types thereof), some are syntactic, while others are purely morphological. It then puts forth a theoretical proposal that regulates the presence of the different types of multiple determiners across languages. The book will be of interst to researchers and students working on the structure of DP, the syntax of modification and the typology of noun phrases. Languages discussed include Greek, Romanian, Scandinavian, English, dialects of German, Hebrew, Albanian, Chinese, French, and Slovenian.